


their last 'gotcha'

by afrenchexit



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-16
Updated: 2013-07-16
Packaged: 2017-12-20 10:09:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/886017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrenchexit/pseuds/afrenchexit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The way she looked at him stripped everything away. All his coy playful speeches, all defenses, all madness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	their last 'gotcha'

**Author's Note:**

> timeline: written around the beginning of s6, before the utah lake.

Standing at the end of the world. He'd been to the end of the Earth, and to the last of humanity, and to the beginning. He'd been again and again, rewritten it. _You make all of space and time your backyard, and what do you have? A backyard. But you, you can see it. And when you see it, I see it._

He watched her standing at the edge of the cliff on the dying red planet. Her red hair flew up around her like that first night, when he held her by her tennis shoe, and she seemed to fly, he remembered, the TARDIS in her wake. _Do you know what I keep in here?_ , and he threw open the doors, turned to look at her expression. _Everything._

She turned from the cliff to face him with tears in her eyes. 

Images came to him all at once. The blue diary, and the bad wolf, and there is something on your back. The little girl with the fairy tale name. _I create myself._ They all did, he realized. They all made themselves, without me. The one with light burning in her eyes, spreading words through time. One carrying a blue book, her possession of it a message to him. And the name she called herself when he first met her, River - she'd named herself.

And now Amy, Amelia, who could remember a story and utter a word and bring him careening back into existence. Stories upon stories, like museum artifacts, all the timelines told and untold, all the narratives that lived in her. _I found you in words._

She stood there at the edge, at the end of this little world she'd never heard of, never even imagined, crying for its death _(how like her, how human, Amelia Pond, crying over a strange planet she never knew)_ , and looking at him, knowing what came next. Next was the Lake. Next was standing at the edge of the water. The astronaut, not floating in the starlight like she had that first night, but rising up out of the water with a mission. 

She walked toward him and put a hand on his cheek. The way she looked at him stripped everything away. All his coy playful speeches, all defenses, all madness. He stood before her and cried, afraid. She pulled him to her and hugged him, standing on her toes, her face buried in his shoulder, like the starry night she'd saved him from himself on Starship UK. Saved everyone from him.

 _I'll bring you back,_ she whispered. _I'll remember the story and bring you back again._

He couldn't speak. Her fingers brushed the back of his neck, the way you would comfort a feverish child.

 _Hey,_ she said, and stepped back to look at him, but he wouldn't let her go completely, and grasped onto her hands. He looked up from her sneakers, dirty and dusted with the reddish sand from the dying planet, into her starlight eyes, into the stories she held there.

 _Hey,_ she smiled. A reminder. _Gotcha._


End file.
